Vera

I couldn’t find any more good Japanese tv series on Netflix, so I decided to try BritBox, a platform with tons of British TV shows (and maybe more, I don’t know). There, I found a nice TV series called Vera. It has (it seems) 4 episodes per season and 13 seasons available as of today, and the episodes are about 90 minutes each. The first few episodes were based on a series of books by Ann Cleeves.

This is the story of Vera Stanhope, a detective chief inspector with the fictional Northumberland and City Police (au sud de la frontière avec l’Ecosse). She is very dedicated to her job but often appears a bit unkempt and in a bad mood. She does have, however, a sharp and analytical mind, and she deeply values her work and her colleagues, although she doesn’t always show it.

What’s funny is that Ann Cleeves said that when she writes new books for her series, she remembers the actress from the tv show (Brenda Blethyn) and now writes with her in mind. So the books influence the tv show and the tv show influences the book.

Can I just say, though, how much I HATE anything where animals are hurt or killed, even when I know it’s not for real? I hated the episode about the poachers. Fortunately, the other ones were excellent.

I am used to tv episodes lasting 50 minutes at most, so this requires a bit more concentration and time, and the stories are sometimes quite intricate but all interesting, with beautiful views of the ocean and all kinds of incredible landscapes that have specific names that I don’t know (they use all kinds of local expressions, like « bairns » instead of « children »). I am currently finishing the 4th season.

The advantage of watching something where the actors speak in English is that I don’t have to concentrate on the closed captions and can feed my cat of toast my bread while watching an episode. The inconvenience, of course, is that my Japanese language skills aren’t getting any better…